While developing an effective internet marketing strategy for your business, one of the decisions you will need to make is on the SEO techniques to use. You could go for organic SEO or Pay Per Click (PPC, but also known as inorganic SEO). These methods, like anything else out there, have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Which one to choose? The bottom line in marketing is to get maximum results with minimal cost. It is your marketing strategy and goals that will determine which approach is most suitable for you. With this in mind, let us look at the differences between organic SEO and PPC.
Organic SEO
Organic SEO is relatively cheaper than PPC but takes more time and effort to set up. Organic SEO is not completely free especially if you choose to engage an SEO consultant/service to either implement or advise you on what would be the best approach. SEO requires constant monitoring. You have to continually tweak the content on your site in order to create content that is attractive to search engine bots.
Beside being more time consuming that its counterpart, Organic SEO is also a continuous process to be very effective, especially for a business with many competitors. But if you keep at it, organic SEO can draw in much more traffic than a PPC campaign. More internet visitors will click on a link on the organic search results than a PPC advert because of its more natural approach to draw traffic by website quality.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is an approach to search engine ranking where you pay to have your site listed among the first results of a particular keyword search. PPC is in fact a search engine advertising. It is called Pay Per Click because you only pay the search engine when someone clicks on your link. PPC keeps your site on the front page solely because you are paying for it. Organic SEO on the other hand takes the more natural and somewhat traditional approach to drawing traffic.
The fundamental differences between PCC and organic SEO are the cost, the effort that goes into each and thus the amount of time it takes to get results. PPC advertising is relatively costly, takes virtually no effort on your part and yields results in a matter of hours or days. If you want to get your business out there quickly and have the budget and supply chain logistics to handle a sudden rise in clients, then PPC may be the thing for you.
The most popular PPC search engine is Google; their PPC advertising program is called AdWords. The next most popular search engines are Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask. A large number of other search engines offering PPC advertising opportunities are available – ranging from metasearch engines that incorporate traffic from numerous other engines and online sources all the way to small, niche search engines that specialize in one or more categories or topics of interest.
The tipping point for PPC is where the cost outweighs the conversions. Since you pay each time someone clicks on your link, having too many clicks can make your advertising costs increase beyond the amount of revenue you are making from people that visit your site and make the purchase.